Juniper’s Mobile Community demonstrating great early results

You may recall that I chatted with Juniper Networks back in April to learn more about the new mobile community they had just launched.

Also, if you were at my presentation at Parafest ’10 you may recall that I shared stats similar to those above.  This report, run on the NetMarketShare web site, shows the devices people are using to browse the web.  As you can see,  mobile browsing continues to rise in terms of the overall percentage of web browsing, nearly doubling from October of last year (82% for the math gurus in the room).

How does Juniper compare to the rest of the world over the same period?

Well, mobile traffic to Juniper has climbed from 0.5% of all traffic to 1.5% of all traffic, 300% increase in terms of its part of overall traffic.  Even more impressive, the other major metrics have taken off since they deployed their mobile community.  These comparisons are against last October’s traffic numbers.

• The average mobile visitor now spends 121 seconds, an 86% increase.
• The average mobile visitor views 2.9 pages per visit, an increase of 81%.
• Bounce rate showed a decrease of 22%. 

Juniper’s mobile visitors are clearly finding tremendous value in this new offering.

I am going to stay in touch with Juniper as they continue to measure and tweak their mobile community.  In the mean time, step back and ask yourself if your community can benefit by providing robust mobile solutions to your customers.

John

Customer Experience Goes Into Overdrive (via Customer Experience Matters)

Bruce Temkin continues to deliver great information about customer experience and customer service. If you have not yet checked out his blog I would recommend you doing so.

His survey shows that many companies are recognizing the need to give great experiences for their customers, and potential customers. Our efforts to deliver results through social business strategies that impact marketing,sales, customer service, and other functions, will play a key role in these efforts.

 In our survey of companies with at least $500 million in annual revenues, only 11% of respondents thought their company was a customer experience leader in their industry (or across industries). But 65% of respondents think their executive team has a goal to be customer experience leaders within three years. My take: Obviously, two-thirds of companies won’t end up leading their industry. But this ambition highlights the focus that companies are s … Read More

via Customer Experience Matters

Insights from a community manager

One of the people I chat with on Twitter, Toby Metcalf, works as a Community Management Associate at OnForce. The OnForce community has been in existence for six years,  Toby has been working with it for the last two years, and I asked him to share some insights from his experiences.

Q. What are the goals of your community?
A. My community is very unique to say the least. Our users are all OnForce service pros. The goals of my community are to make money and grow their IT / CE businesses. As a member of the Community Mgmt. team, I help manage the largest product my company offers; the service pros themselves – I help them use our platform efficiently, and provide them a forum to suggest site enhancements and an in-road to communicate problems.

Q. Is the community part of an overall strategy or something that grew organically due to grass-roots efforts?
A. The community is certainly part of our overall strategy: we have 2 products – our Platform and our Pro Community. Keeping the pros happy and giving them the tools to do their jobs makes our customers loyal to OnForce.

Q. Do you have usage policies setup for employees around how they are expected to behave within the community?
A. Absolutely. There are three of us on the Community Mgmt Team; we are the mods of the community and the voice of OnForce. We are the only three within OnForce who use our forums: it is very important that our messages are consistent, honest, and professional.

Q. What ROI have you seen from your community?
A. Because of all the experience and knowledge shared within our forums, our Pros can perform their jobs well, thus providing an excellent experience for our customers. Our customers believe in the quality of the pros they find on OnForce; this satisfaction translates into fewer calls to our Market Support team. It is our excellent community of Pros that makes OnForce the leader of our industry.

Q. What tools are you leveraging for your communities?
A. We have built an excellent command center for the Pros that helps them manages their work-day, as well as communicate with their customers. We have negotiated excellent rates (some even free) for industry specific training.

Q. Do you leverage mobile technologies as part of your communities?
A. We do: a WAP site for them to check and accept work orders through smart phones, an IVR for them to dial into and update their status with their customers (check in, check out of the site). A phone app is in the works – we are always looking to enhance our document management and mobile tools.

Q. What policies or best practices have you established?
A. Utilizing the IVR to document your time on site (Customers like a pro who is punctual as well as knowledgeable). Utilize our system to document any conversations that cover changes to work order scope or money (a phone call is great for communication, but not for documentation).

Q. Any tips for others involved in community management?
A. Be Fair
Be Honest
Ask questions
Admit when you are wrong
Don’t forget the personal touch – call or use direct messages

What is your approach to Social Business or Government 2.0?

Once again it is time for a survey and I am using SurveyMonkey so it is, unfortunately, not embedded in this post as nicely as I would like. The questions focus on your approach to Social Business Strategies (think social media done right) for your organization (business, federal agency, local government, etc..).  The survey should take 5 minutes, tops and I truly appreciate your time to answer these questions.

Click here to take survey

Results,  once completed, will be shared with all.

Crowdsourced tips from my Twitter community

Alright, you know I like Rob Cottingham’s Noise to Signal cartoons, they are awesome. I am once again lifting one of Rob’s cartoons (with permission of course) because it fits well with this post.

Twitter, like any other social media channel, has its upper echelon, its average users, its new users, and so on and so forth. So often people forget that they are engaging with real people and real organizations and simply make foolish choices.  We’ve all done it, to be honest, but we do not want to make a habit of it.  On the flip side, there are many, many, people and organizations doing great work which I try to constantly celebrate in my various case studies and interviews.

First, in honor of those that have lost their way, much as our well-followed friend in the cartoon, here are some of the things not to  do any longer:

• Stop referring to yourself as a visionary, ninja, guru, expert, or something similar. My friends @JoeManna, @TheMaria, @Eric_Andersen, @WendyWooWho, and @BillShander were discussing this recently and all agreed that this is a real turn-off.  If someone else refers to you in this way, fine, but please never write these phrases into your profile.
• @AntOf9 shared this:  ”10+ “listening to ___ song” tweets in a row (not same as I LOVE THIS SONG! tweets), w/ meaningless foursquare posts a close 2nd.”
• From @MikeSmithDev, “auto DMs. About as productive as having a conversation with an answering machine.”
• @JNJosh points out “The word “Crowdsource” ” .  Of course, he was also laughing at my attempt to crowd-source this blog post.
• @LoisMelbourne shared this pet-peeve, “people that stuff my twitter stream with multiple tweets all at once intentionally”.
• @Mattrdmn shares a much more practical issue as he notes “I have a hard time finding new people to follow. I find myself searching and searching but a lot of the things I’m interested in are tweeted by spam feeds.”
• Then @Story_Jon looks at two extremes when he notes “Broad: Self serving twitter strategies. Narrow: Automation, paid tweets, and not tweeting for yourself (ie Britney Spears)”
• @Quinno99 notes “How To Make Money on Twitter” spam, followed by news orgs tweeting celebrity gossip.” while @wilsonsway also notes “Spam and pushy sales #Twitter”
• My friend, @StephMcDonald, noted the one that disturbed me the most when she pointed out “People who randomly send you their blog w naked pics of themselves b/c you mentioned “cooking” in a tweet. Not kidding.”

In terms of positives, there is a huge list, as I have noted, of organizations and individuals doing it right.

• @wilsonsway noted “How to improve content, learning new things about Linux, for example. #twitter”
• @MattRdmn notes “I love the way news travels on twitter. How a story can break here and I only hear about it on the news the next day.”

Equally as important, never forget that many organizations are delivering real value through collaborative solutions and social media driven support, marketing, and sales.  Companies are reducing operational costs, increasing collaboration internally and externally, and often times breaking down the walls that should never have been erected in the first place.

John

How does AddThis engage its customers using social strategies?

A friend of mine on Twitter noted that the AddThis team, which is a clearspring company, provides great support  via its community. I reached out to Justin Thorp, the Community Manager for AddThis, to learn  more.

Q. How does social media fit into the overall goals of your business?
A. We utilize social media as a way to meet potential customers and sustain relationships with our existing customers.

Q. What processes did you put in place to enable going social?
A. There wasn’t really any process. When I started 2+ years ago, the executive team knew that they needed to be out there talking to our customers and the community at large more than they were. On day one, I was given the keys to the car and told to get started. I quickly looked for where the community and our customers were spending their time and I jumped in.

Q. What social communication policies have you put in place?
A. I wouldn’t say that we have policies. It’s more work flows and best practices to ensure that we’re always putting out the best we can but still optimized for agility. For example, every time we write something, it’s read by someone for copy editing and then by that product group leader for accuracy and messaging check.

Q. How did you go about tool selection?
A. We’re all about using whatever best-in-class tools that help us to effectively meet potential customers and sustain relationships with our existing ones.

Q. How many people do you have monitoring the social channels today?
A. It’s primarily me but I get a lot of great help from our Director of User Experience, Creative Director, VP of Engineering, Tech Support Lead, and even our CEO will jump in from time to time.

Q. How large is the community you manage and what types of users do you engage with?
A. The AddThis user community is very large. AddThis is currently deployed on over 1.5 million websites that, according to comScore, reach over 674 million end users every month. This includes everyone from the Royal British Monarchy to Perez Hilton to a dentist’s office. We work to give them all the same first class experience.

Q. Do you measure ROI today? If yes, how? What have been the early results?
A. Measuring the direct ROI derived from community and social media efforts is more art than science. It’s hard to draw strict causal relationships. We do though keep a very close eye on a number of key performance indicators about the health of the community, which we believe directly relate to how well we stay in touch with and provide quality to our customers.

Q. What KPIs do you monitor, even as a couple of examples?
A. For example, we look closely at how many websites have integrated AddThis. We look at how many people those websites reach. Obviously, the goal is for those to continue to increase. It’s a big Web and there are always more people that we can help.

Q. If you had to estimate a return, while difficult, what ballpark would it be at?
A. We focus on giving our customers a top-notch experience with the hope that maybe they’ll go back to their friends and tell them about us. We firmly believe that based on the growth that we’ve seen that this has worked very well.

Q. How, if at all, do your social media tools fit in with your other backend systems like CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc..?
A. We’re currently experimenting with how we can better use social media tools with our CRM system. I don’t believe the integration is as good as it can be so it’s something that we continue to monitor closely.

Q. Do you do anything with mobile solutions?
A. Absolutely, I use Twitter on my iPhone all the time. A number of times I’ve responded to customer tweets while standing on the subway platform, waiting for the train home.

Q. What is the next big thing on the community front in your opinion?
A. Over the next year, we’re going to see a plethora of tools come out that will continue to make it easier for us to “scale caring.” With the size of our community being what it is, it’s hard to stay in touch with everyone. The future will bring tools that will help to tie together all the existing platforms so that you can really focus on building relationships.

Are your collaborative efforts one-sided?

“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.” - Colonel Jessup in the movie A Few Good Men

Organizations that choose to deploy collaborative solutions, ranging from Twitter to Facebook to full-blown community software, are making a decision that it is time to engage their customers, their citizens, in a bi-directional dialog.  This dialog is not for dialogs sake alone, it is meant to deliver a return on investment.  For businesses, this should lead to higher profits.  For local governments and federal agencies it should lead to better delivery of services. For politicians it should lead to winning an election.

However, some organizations do not seem to fully understand what they are signing up for and choose to clamp down, to guard those walls and treat their customers, their citizens, as the enemy, keeping them at a safe and comfortable distance.  It was with disappointment that I read about the Social Media Policy in use by the city of Charlotte, NC.  Charlotte has a Facebook fan page where citizens are allowed to leave comments but only city employees can view those comments, not other citizens.

While other large cities in the area, as well as North Carolina itself, have an open policy Charlotte stands alone, fearing lawsuits that might arise from inappropriate posts.  While I respect the concern, I feel strongly that the move is the wrong one.

If you want to leverage Social Business Strategies remember:

• Define clear guidelines, a clear Social Media Policy, for employees.
• Define accepted use policies for your customers/citizens.  Instead of blocking access to comments clearly state what is acceptable.  In the case of questionable wall posts, if you fear deleting them create an area, maybe within a discussion board, where questionable wall posts are moved.  This enables citizens to exercise their right to free speech without allowing offensive comments to side track your goals.
• If you do not wish to publish citizen feedback through social channels then stick to making your web site and your feedback forms the best they can be.  Each social channel has its own social norms and expectations.  If you do not wish to work within this framework, consider other channels.

What do you think?   Is Charlotte doing the right thing?

John

The questions companies have when adding social to customer service

At the closing session of the Parafest conference that I attended, and at which I spoke about Social Media and Collaborative solutions, the product management of Parature shared this slide.  The slide represents the results of polling customer, throughout the conference, about their concerns, their questions, about adding social channels to their customer service efforts.  I know the slide is a little fuzzy but I am hoping to make it just a bit clearer through this post.

Can I add Social Media Channels with my current staff?

To fully answer this question without knowing your business, your agency, is impossible. However, understand that interacting with customers on social channels will initially add more work and more cost.  The reasons, simple:

- In order to be successful in the long run you must define a business plan and understand how social media will weave into your existing strategy.

- You need to set up Social Media Usage guidelines and make these part of your HR policies, IT policies, and train current staff as well as all new hires.

- You need to find tools to use.  Fortunately, you can start with free tools for monitoring and for engaging in the conversation.

- You must track your activities and tie the conversations into your workflow.

And that, is just a small set of the things you must get in place.  Done well, you will achieve real cost savings, more positive relationships, and increased customer satisfaction survey.  However, this requires you putting the time and effort into truly engaging and tying these systems and channels into your overall workflow.  If you simply create a Facebook page and Twitter account and do nothing with them you have simply wasted your time.

Which of our customers are on Facebook (or any other Social network)?

This is always a tough question to answer.  However, keep a few of these statistics in mind:

• There are more than 100 million Twitter accounts in existence today and more than 300 thousand new accounts are created daily.  Of those accounts, around 11 million are regular users.  More than 55 million tweets (messages) are sent daily.  See this post on some other great twitter statistics.
• There are more than 400 million Facebook accounts and  more than 50% of these users login daily.  35 million, roughly 10%, update their status daily and more than 20 million people a day become fans.  See this post on other great Facebook statistics.

You must take the information above, marry it to your knowledge of your customers (current and potential) and decide if they are on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Plurk, Flickr, or any of the other sites that matter to you.  Also, use Google searches to look for conversations taking place about your market, your company, your key people.  If they are taking place on these platforms you may want to participate.

Will Social Media Support be added volume?

Absolutely.  You will be engaging with more people, having more conversations, and having to decide how these conversations fit with your overall communication plan.  The good news is if  you do it right, and take these conversations and convert them into meaningful knowledge base articles you will ultimately create a richer customer experience and deflect many customer questions later.

Also, by engaging with these customers on the channels where they live, you are building a relationship that could lead to stronger brand advocates, more leads, higher customer retention rates.

Who manages Social Media?  Marketing or Customer Service?

Typically, management of social media begins in marketing.  In my view the most important thing is that marketing and customer service jointly own, jointly take part, in the customer communication.  These two organizations, which should become part of one newer organization that works to deliver a consistent message to existing and potential customers, must work together to communicate consistently with the market.

What types of conversations are happening?

Customers and potential customers are sharing stories, experiences.  They are complaining, as well as celebrating, daily about your company and others.  It is your job to amplify the positive, learn from and address the negative.

How will we benefit from Social Media as a support channel?

Meeting customers and potential customers where they are is never a bad thing, obviously.  However, the benefits depend entirely upon your goals, the strategies you use, and your tactics, tools, and people.  Social media should always focus on delivering real business value.  Relationships are critical, of course, but they do not pay your bills.  The benefits you should be looking for include:

• Reduced operational cost for support.  Again, up front it will cost more but over time it will allow greater scaling of your support organization.
• Lead generation.  Finding those that have an interest in the problems you solve, your products, your services, becomes easier once you are part of these conversations.  Not only should you look for a great number of leads being generated, you should look for better qualified leads at the same time.

How do we measure satisfaction with Social Media?

Let me ask you this…. How do you measure satisfaction today?  Social media is just another channel to interact on, right?

What other questions do you have?  Do you have alternate viewpoints to my thoughts above?

John

Parature for Facebook, a very good start for Social Support Communities

I am in Las Vegas for a couple of days at the Parafest ’10 conference, here to speak about Social Support Communities.  One of the key announcements came in the form of a new product, Parature for Facebook.

What is Parature for Facebook?

First, it is in beta, not fully released, but is due out in June. The folks at Rosetta Stone did a demo of the integration during the opening session and they will be rolling it out to their customers prior to the official release.  While it did not work bug-free, it worked well and the value of this solution is clear.

If you are a Parature customer the integration begins with downloading, via the Facebook store, and installing, to your fan pages.   While we did not go into details about the configuration it sounds straightforward, selecting keywords, permissions, etc.

Your Facebook fans will see a new support tab on you fan page where they can search for answers to their questions about your products and your services.  They can also enter tickets, see responses, all from the comfort of the Facebook fan page interface.

Okay, okay, you’re not yet impressed, I know… I see that look on your face…. Let me continue.

The Facebook support tab is purely a front-end to the full Parature software application.  Knowledge base searches happen directly against your ONE knowledge base, there is no need to create multiple articles.  The same thing is true for tickets, which leads to another benefit….

Your customer service reps never have to leave their familiar user interface, their support portal.  They process tickets there and the responses are automatically visible within Facebook.  Nice, both sides of the relationship benefit from never having to leave their familiar user interface.   Nice.

What’s missing then?

Parature has done a great job here and I tip my hat to them.  However, here are a handful of tips that I would ask Parature, and all of you, to consider:

• From a mindset perspective there is education needed.  Parature spoke of this as addressing the CMOs question about a companies Facebook strategy.  Facebook is simply a channel, don’t focus on having a Facebook strategy, focus on having a customer success strategy.
• Facebook is but one social community and there are clearly many, many, more.   Twitter has more than 11 million active users (110+ million registered), YouTube, Flickr, and yes, even MySpace.  The power of meeting customers where they are begins with actually meeting customers where they are.  This is a great start but far from the end.  These plug-ins are needed for the other major communities as well.
• Measurement, analytics. Your customer support organization must have data to assist them in making the right decisions and executives need data to understand how their investments are doing.  Channel level information is critical and an area that Parature must do much more work to make this solution valuable in the long run.
• Search.  Customer service agents define keyword searches to define which customer conversations are tracked, which are visible in their consoles.  Keyword searches are a good start but it’s important to dig into sentiment analysis techniques to further define which conversations get the attention of busy customer service representatives.  I would look to partnerships, or acquisitions, to round out these capabilities.

That’s all for now, talk soon.

John

The better you know your customers the happier they will be… Surprised?

No business, local government, or agency is ever surprised by this simple statement.  However, the way they do business is often very different.  Information living in silos.  Departments, teams, not communicating.  Leaders, executives, failing to communicate goals and strategies clearly.

From the time you begin marketing to potential customers through the point of sale, from the delivery of services through calls between customers and your customer service team…  With these touch points you are demonstrating your perceived value of your customers (potential and existing).  While many companies focus on great messaging and sales techniques too few companies focus on developing a complete view of their customers to maximize the relationship throughout the lifetime of this relationship.

Have you ever?

Had a problem with a product or service and called into customer support?  Maybe you had a problem with your iPod or maybe it was an issue with your voter registration.  Either way you started off by making a simple phone call to get the problem resolved.

As  you were transferred from person to person, each asking you the same basic questions, you begin to slowly realize that there is no consistent understanding of who you are, what your problems are.  This lack of understanding leads to frustration for everyone….  You do not feel the love.

MarketingProfs released some great information in a post titled Access to Customer Data = Retention, Sales, covering the importance of this complete customer view, you should give it a read.  The first paragraph says it well:

“Companies that have access to a holistic view of customer data achieve better customer service and efficiency, improved loyalty, and  more repeat business from their established customers, according to a study by Aberdeen Group and VeraCentra.”

Those of you that know me well know that my first thought is that a CRM strategy, complimented by solid tools, is key.  This article points out a  couple eye-catching stats right at the beginning:

• Best in class companies, those that excel at this whole customer view, see a 91% customer retention rate and an increase in net customer value (NCV) of 6% year over year.
• The lowest performing companies, the laggards, see a 62% retention rate and a decrease of NCV by 9% year over year.

If these number fail to get your attention you should make some popcorn and watch Sleeping Beauty as a fairly tale existence is probably more to your liking.

While I will let you read the full article, these are the key practices demonstrated by the best companies:

• 80% capture customer history and make it visible to all customer-facing staff.
• 77% have a single or primary point of contact in their company for each customer.
• 52% have a technology-based common view of the customer.
• 72% monitor customer satisfaction.

These companies are not locking data in silos, they are blasting customer information throughout the organization enabling all areas of the company to see the complete picture of the customer. 

Are you investing in the necessary strategies and tools to enable yourself to be a best of breed organization or are you satisfied with being just one of the crowd?

John